The last couple of weeks we have attended many events and activities related to our project, which helped us with planning out the project, giving more insights on our subject, and getting experience with various design methods.
INSPIRE workshop
The weekend of 14 and 15 March we attended the INSPIRE workshop, organised by Innovation Studio Fukuoka. Here the other teams participating in the ‘Innovation of Life Course’ project presented their findings till now, with the second day being focused on creating ideas of concrete prototypes and pitching these. As we had not yet finished our research we decided to focus on planning our project instead, writing down what we wanted to do in the weeks ahead.
Interview Yamashita-san
The next week we had another interview, this time with Yamashita-san. Yamashita-san is 65 years old, and worked for many years as an English teacher before retiring. She told us that she took great pleasure in her work and would have loved to continue working, but being of retirement age forced her to quit her job. The days after her retirement she would be walking around her neighbourhood, not knowing what to do with her time. However, she soon started many other activities like joining a storytelling group and volunteering as a translator. This was not surprising to us as she seemed like a very optimistic and sociable person. But she told us many other elderly people stop going outside after retiring and stay inside most of the time. As we had picked up from previous interviews, this could be caused by people working so much during employment that they have little time to develop hobbies and relationships, and end up with little left after retirement.
Business Origami session
The week thereafter we attended a Business Origami session. Business Origami is a design method created by the Hitachi Design Center. Paper cut-outs are being used to represent different players and parts in the design of a service, with arrows indicating the relationship between these. As we did not have a concrete idea for a prototype yet we attended the Business Origami session of another participant in the Innovation Studio Fukuoka program. However, as it looked like a very useful method we will definitely try using it when we start prototyping (and of course update you on our results).
Next to the INSPIRE workshop, the interview and the Business Origami session, we also had a meeting with professor Hirai who is guiding our project. Professor Hirai told us that a lack of innovation currently seems to be a big problem in Japanese companies. According to him this is mostly due to the conservative work culture in many of these companies. He therefore suggested us to also look at how we could foster a culture of innovation at companies here.